When I first landed in Manchester it was 6am and I was exhausted. I can’t even begin to explain what was going through my mind. I had no idea where to go or who I should be meeting. All I could think about was the crazy stories I had heard on the news about a month earlier about students who went abroad for a travel program and when the arrived overseas they found out that it was all a scam. This was the first time in my life I had ever done something so independently. I kept wondering if I really knew what I was doin. All I knew was that I have always wanted to study abroad and when looking online this seemed like the perfect program for me. However, I didn’t take into consideration the fact that I wouldn’t be finishing finals until Friday May 9th and wouldn’t be going home until Sunday May 11th. That left me very little time to pack or plan and I’m not used to being so unprepared. When I arrived I was so nervous about going through customs and finding where I needed to be.
All of my fears were clamed when I got my bag and saw Joanna holding an orange Edge Hill College sign. I introduced myself and immediately felt comfortable. Joanna told me we were waiting on one other student. A few minutes later Jackie walked out and we made our way to Edge Hill College. The two of us got along well from the start and that made the hour long car ride a bit less awkward.
We arrived at Edge Hill around 7:30 am and were met by two very friendly women. They brought us to our rooms to drop off our stuff and then showed us around campus. We ended up at the international office at around 8 am. Little did we know we would be spending the next three hours sitting on those horrid lime green velvet couches. Jackie and I were about to go insane but it definitely forced us to get to know each other. Around 10:30 am three more members of our group showed up and we were so excited to finally see other people. After we introduced ourselves Chris, our go to man in the international office, took the six of us on a tour of campus. After that we had around thirty minutes to get our stuff situated in our rooms and head over to lunch. I’m not going to lie, the rooms really sketched me out and I started to question how much I was going to like it here at Edge Hill, especially after that lunch that was not exactly my idea of good food.
After lunch Chris took the whole group on a tour of Ormskirk. It was a beautiful day and I was happy that I was starting to meet some of the other students. Ormskirk far surpassed my expectations. On the ride to campus I felt like the college was in the middle of nowhere and that we would have nothing to do. To my surprise downtown Ormskirk was just a short walk away and filled with things to do.
When we arrived back on campus we went to a dinner and played a quiz testing our U.K. knowledge. We shortly found out that we were all severely lacking that, but the quiz helped us learn more about where we would be staying for the next few weeks. Dinner was interested. Let’s just say that I picked out a wrap that looked like steak, and soon found out that it was definitely not steak.
To wrap up the day, a group of us went back to Eleanor Rothbone and hung out with the local students. They brought us to the Venue and suggested different types of “lemonades”. The students from Edge Hill as well as the ones in the study abroad program, all seemed extremely friendly and I was beginning to see that I would be having a phenomenal time here in England.